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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26380687">made your mark on me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/benwvatt/pseuds/benwvatt'>benwvatt</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Resident (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, romanticization of early mornings and pancake breakfasts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:34:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,906</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26380687</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/benwvatt/pseuds/benwvatt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Nic hums in her sleep, her bare, freckled shoulder pressed up against Conrad's. Her back turns against his, shifting, and he wants to trace the dimple curving into her spine so badly.</i>
</p><p>or; it's a saturday morning, and he thinks he might be in love with her. this is set a couple years before season 1 starts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Conrad Hawkins/Nicolette Nevin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. one</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So there’s a flash of blonde hair in his bedroom, there’s her chapstick thrown into the bedside table she doesn’t technically own (with the cap half-on, because Nic is twenty-nine and still can’t figure out how to shove chapstick back into the tube. Conrad finds it endearing. Nic calls it infuriating, and a little bit unfair how it always happens to her. To Conrad, the sheer injustice is the endearing part.)</p><p>Her bra’s perched on his headboard, where he flung it last night, and he’s thinking about the way she murmured his name, desperate and soft, hours ago. He might do just about <i>anything</i> to hear his own name the way she says it, letter by letter tied together with the italics of her breaths. Nic is right next to him, curled against his waist. There’s a birthmark on her shoulder, jagged like stone, and he can see it through the white bedsheet. There’s another two he can’t see, but he’s memorized their imprint on her thighs.</p><p>Deep breath. There’s a flash of blonde hair in his bedroom, now more like bedhead beneath his blue comforter, and he thinks he might be in love with her.</p><p>So … yeah. Minor midlife (quarterlife? hopefully??) crisis. Conrad’s only loved one other woman before, and that was years ago, back when he wasn’t old enough to order a beer.</p><p>He’s fully aware that Nic Nevin is way, <i>way</i> out of his league, what with how she throws her head back when she laughs. Her eyes scrunch up, unafraid of crows’ feet, and she starts hiding her smile behind her hand but decides it isn’t worth it, really, to sacrifice the leftover joy. She’s gorgeous (has he said that already?) and it keeps Conrad looking her way every time someone says a joke at the bar. Did she laugh too? Did she? It isn’t funny until she does.</p><p>Her grace is in the drumbeats she plays against the steering wheel during traffic jams, in the identical streaks of salad dressing she’ll pour on her lunch. He’s dating a delightfully ordinary, vaguely eccentric weirdo, the kind that can only eat croutons in even numbers, and Conrad saves his for her. Just in case. He likes them fine, but he likes her superstitions more.</p><p>Nic hums in her sleep, her bare, freckled shoulder pressed up against his.</p><p>Her back turns against him, shifting, and he wants to trace the dimple curving into her spine so badly. She’d shivered when he did it last night. But Conrad won’t interrupt her sleep for anything, so he turns over and stares at the bedroom ceiling. He thinks about the eighth chapstick Nic’s tried (raspberry, couldn’t get it into the tube) and how it’s rolling around in the junk drawer in his kitchen. And the ninth (green apple, also a failure), and the tenth (winter berry, unopened. Hmm, wonder how that one’ll go.)</p><p>Conrad thinks about girls with bad luck and good omens. And he thinks he might love Nic enough to roam through fields of three-leaf clovers to find a rarity, to gather a bouquet of them, and these are awfully premature things to think when you’re on the sixteenth date, a handful of months into a relationship.</p><p>(She counted aloud, he did it in secret.)</p><p>But he thinks them all the same.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. two</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>Nic’s a complex person. She can fit Saturday-morning breakfast foods and delicate new beginnings on the same wayward train of thought.</i>
</p><p>in which I imagine a Romantic Breakfast Scene because, if I recall, we haven't had one yet on the resident</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The window is hazy, fogged with frost, and Nic can hear Conrad’s slow breaths as she pretends to sleep. She cracks one eye open at a time. He’s lying flat across the mattress, arms crossed beneath his head. Nic wishes she could read his mind sometimes, what with the way he keeps everything bottled up, but Conrad’s gotten better at it the longer she’s known him.</p><p>She squints, recognizing the contours of his ‘but I’m thinking so many <span class="u">thoughts</span>’ face. (She recognizes it from scrabble, when Conrad’s stuck between several disappointing four-letter-words, none of which she can recognize because he claims that Latin, and French, and Spanish technically count.) Nic doesn’t know whether to nudge him, so she opens her mouth and blurts, “Hey, are you hungry?”</p><p>There’s a pause and she cringes, feeling a bit dumb for ruining the silence. She never was very good at biting her tongue.</p><p>“Uh, yeah,” Conrad replies, voice rough. He sits up and runs a hand through his hair, reaching for his shirt, crumpled on the hardwood floor. “I’ll make you breakfast if you like. D’you want anything specific?”</p><p><i>He’ll make her breakfast! If she <span class="u">likes</span>!!!</i> Nic turns away to hide her grin from him, keeping the joy to herself. Right now, it feels too early to share with anyone else. The concept of him &amp; her, of an <i>us,</i> is too fragile, barely budding out of cracks in the sidewalk, to be thrown into the scorch of sunlight.</p><p>She pauses, tangent turning in her head. “What about pancakes?”</p><p>(Nic’s a complex person. She can fit Saturday-morning breakfast foods and delicate new beginnings on the same wayward train of thought.)</p><p>“Alright.” Conrad comes around to her side of the bed, laying a kiss on her temple, and he walks off into the bathroom.</p><p>Nic sits up in bed, the sheets gathered around her waist, and she tugs at the hem of her t-shirt to sort out its wrinkles before following him in. It doesn’t work, anyhow. The wrinkles persist. Conrad nods at her while they’re brushing their teeth, and he couples it with a touch of her hand that seems to convey the welcome of <i>hi, how’d you sleep?</i> that hotel commercials never seem to catch.</p><p>Nic spits into the sink, turning on the faucet. “What kind of person likes cinnamon toothpaste?” She frowns, looking at his side of the counter. She ignores the fact that he’s set the toothpaste aside to make room for her, so she even has a space to call her own. They’re not an <i>us</i> yet. Cracks in the sidewalk. Scorch of the sun and all that.</p><p>“Um, only people who live life on the edge,” Conrad replies. “Who likes peppermint? It’s so basic. <i>Very</i> last year, if I’m up to date on Orthodontist Magazine’s latest spread.”</p><p>“Everyone uses mint!”</p><p>“Yeah, everyone <i>conventional.</i> Besides, what do you have against cinnamon?”</p><p>“It’s weird! And vaguely spicy! It’s not suited to be a toothpaste.” Nic scoffs. “That’d be, like, if you had salt-and-pepper floss.”</p><p>He turns to walk out the bathroom door, teasing, “Not gonna lie, I hate everything you just said.”</p><p>Nic runs her thumb over the silver of his ring, hands resting on the countertop. “But you’ll still make me pancakes?”</p><p>“Uh, if you’ll let me put cinnamon on them, then yes.”</p><p>“Deal.”</p>
<hr/><p>Conrad burns the first three pancakes because he’s busy staring and leaning over the griddle to tease “hi there, come here often?” like a sap. Nic makes fun of him before the smoke alarm rings. He rushes over to open the windows because <i>shitshitshit unintended consequence of flirting with the pretty girl in the kitchen!!!</i> and Nic waits for the alarm to stop screeching before leaning over and stealing a pancake off his plate.</p><p>He doesn’t mind, just passes her the syrup and cuts his remaining breakfast into weird little triangle eighths, fork and knife scraping against the ceramic dish.</p><p>Nic asks why, and Conrad offers <i>why not?</i> as his rationale. She leans over and plucks an eighth of a pancake off his dish.</p><p>“Y’know you’ve got your own, right?” he teases.</p><p>“Eh,” she murmurs, “why do all the work of cutting if you’ll do it for me?”</p><p>Conrad admits that triangle-y pancakes are, to put it mildly, not the best idea he’s had lately. “Even worse than the time I tried to cover up the chipped paint in the bathroom with some of your nail polish since it kindasorta matched, and then it was too dark so I had to use your remover and then everything smelled like Sharpies so you ended up nearly fumigating the place?”</p><p>“Hey, that was two whole weeks ago, and you’re better at matching paint colors now.”</p><p>He raises an eyebrow.</p><p>“I mean, you’re not amazing at it, but I like to think your judgment’s improved somewhat since then-”</p><p>“Slightly.”</p><p>“Slightly’s an improvement!” she points out.</p><p>“Thank you for defending my honor,” Conrad says, adding cinnamon to his dish, “especially in its time of need.” He over-sprinkles and frowns at his pancake then.</p><p>You know that moment when someone does something so endearing, insignificant as it might be, that it just makes you want to hold their hand and buy them flowers?</p><p>Yeah.</p><p>She’s buying him flowers someday.</p><p>Nic likes the scent of Conrad’s deodorant and aftershave, the way it clings to the collars of hoodies she’s willingly stolen from his closet. She sits on the kitchen counter, perfectly content with track shorts clinging to her skin and thumbs hooked through holes in his jacket. The room smells like burnt pancakes and at-least-this-isn’t-burned coffee, milk and sugar just the way she drinks it. Conrad apologizes for the wasted food and the fifteen-minute-ago, already-forgotten chirp of the smoke alarm, yet Nic laughs it off.</p><p>She can’t remember the last time she waved off a siren; it’d always been a thing when she and Jessie were growing up, the shivers that raced up and down her back when there was too much noise for a room to hold. Car alarms. Firetrucks, fireworks, anything.</p><p>But Nic gnashes her teeth slightly before remembering to stop, to <i>breathe</i>, and keeps two windows cracked open to air the kitchen out. The room holds all their noise now, the murmurs and the told-you-so’s regarding the general benefits of cinnamon.</p><p>“Listen, just because it tastes good on food doesn’t mean it tastes good in toothpaste!”</p><p>“Beg to differ,” Conrad says, taking a bite of his breakfast. “It’s put into toothpaste because people enjoy it. Just like kids’ bubblegum flavor.”</p><p>“Ah, yes, I remember when I used to eat bubblegum for breakfast. Good times.” Nic smiles, persists. She reaches for the ground cinnamon, shaking it gently over her plate.</p><p>“Well, that’s not the point!”</p><p>“What is?!”</p><p>“We’re going in circles.” she laughs.</p><p>“Just eat your breakfast, okay?” He leans in to kiss her, leans across a cinnamon shaker and a bowl of powdered sugar and a silver jar of actual white sugar cubes because he’s apparently dating a television chef, or at least an expert in <i>how to decorate pancakes your boyfriend made</i> but an amateur when it comes to making said pancakes.</p><p> “I-”</p><p>Nic bites her tongue.</p><p>“I will.”</p><p>Too soon to say she loves him, but it’s a little too late to realize.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading! comments and kudos mean a lot to me.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. three</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  <i>She’s a wanderer, a wondrous one, and she kneads her thumb into his palm in swirls and hearts.</i>
</p><p>help they're in love and I can't handle it</p><p>The Resident comes back January 12th!! I'm so excited, I love this show so much</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Conrad knows they’ve been on a handful of dates. There was the time at the Georgia Aquarium, which went well until the moment he noticed Nic was terrified of whale sharks, so they had to tiptoe past the display, beyond the fascinated children and semi-bored high-schoolers taking pictures on their iPhones. She was squeezing his hand so hard, there were crescent moons pressed into his skin. (I mean, of all the places where you could avoid whales and/or sharks, he took her to the whale shark capital of the U.S.)</p><p>They’d laughed afterward, about phobias and shades of navy blue seawater that set off alarms in her head, and he swore he wouldn’t tell anyone about this particular quirk. It’s just one of her many.</p><p>There was the picnic in the park, when it’d rained so softly Conrad had questioned whether it was truly necessary for him to hold an umbrella for the both of them. Nic had pouted at puddles too small to splash in, told him childhood stories about rubber boots and raincoats covered in cartoon frogs. She seemed to like the yellow glow the umbrella created, so Conrad held it as they walked home. Nic looked for four-leaf clovers among the fields and fields of ordinaries. She stepped over cracks in the sidewalk that she suspected might cause the butterfly effect halfway around the world.</p><p>Then they’d had the hospital gala with platters of hors d'oeuvres and dancing under a comically large chandelier, and also the time visiting an animal shelter (which, technically, was community outreach but ended with Nic nearly adopting a labradoodle, so it was still a win. A much better idea than the aquarium, in retrospect.)</p><p>Conrad knows they’ve been on dates before. He just doesn’t know how many is <i>enough</i> before he tells her he loves her. (There ought to be a formula for these things. Y’know, length of the relationship multiplied by commitment level on a scale of 1 to 5.)</p><p>So Conrad washes Nic’s dishes because he knows detergent makes her skin itch, and he accepts the zigzags she drags over his hands in thanks. She’s a wanderer, a wondrous one, and she kneads her thumb into his palm in swirls and hearts. Nic says she does it because she likes the pressure of skin against surface. The presence of weight, of gravity.</p><p>“Were you a professional hand masseuse in a past life?”</p><p>“Yeah,” she murmurs, “I worked at a spa and poured cucumber water during my breaks. The whole nine yards.”</p><p>He chuckles. She’s still holding his hand and he feels fifteen but brighter, better than the age of fifteen actually treated him, feeling like <i>hey, when I learn how to drive, I want to ask you out and wait in your driveway before meeting your father and calling him ‘sir’ out of fumbled respect.</i></p><p>“It’s nice, though. You’re very cute when you go all tactile,” Conrad says.</p><p>Nic slows her movements. “Sorry, it’s, uh, an absentminded thing. Sometimes I don’t realize I’m doing it.”</p><p>“It’s fine. It’s nice. I like having your hands all over me.”</p><p>She nearly chokes with laughter.</p><p>“I didn’t mean that as dirty as it sounded!” Conrad tilts his head to the side. “Well, technically, I did, but you know what I mean.”</p><p>“You need a better brain-to-mouth filter.” Nic turns to him, kisses him.</p><p>“Or maybe, y’know, I’m really good at meaning what I say.” He leans in.</p><p>He loves her when she’s like this, loves her coy and her bashful nature. When they’re falling asleep, wrapped up in the dark gloom of sunset, Nic asks again.</p><p>“You really don’t mind the tactile thing?”</p><p>“I like it. ‘S soothing, really.” He lets a pause roll itself out like a red carpet before he continues. “And besides, I like the other tactile things you do.”</p><p>Nic hits him with a pillow. “Your head’s in the gutter, my friend.”</p><p>“The gutter’s a nice place! We visit it quite frequently.”</p><p>She groans. “Please don’t compare the places we have sex, like this bed, to a gutter.”</p><p>“Too late.”</p>
<hr/><p>Nic’s not really a long-term-relationship kind of girl. Not that she’d be opposed to it, she thinks, glancing over her shoulder at the boyfriend stacking old magazines in the closet. Nic likes the idea of someone who would stay, she truly does. Someone who’d take her home, someone who’d be her emergency contact without a second thought. But she’s not used to the idea of anyone who’d linger around for her.</p><p>People are always so eager to impress in the first few moments. ‘Of course I’ll be your plus-one! Count me in. And sure, we can make plans to visit that restaurant you like! It’s you and me.’</p><p>But days trickle into weeks. Fingertips slip away from palms. The dream of <i>we should go there</i> turns into <i>maybe next time, okay?</i></p><p>You’re supposed to leave relationships before anyone gets the opportunity or the bright idea to leave you first.</p><p>So Nic ignores the concept of him &amp; her, like a package deal tied up neatly with a bow, because it’s too soon. She cares more than she should.</p><p>“There! Not sure why you need to keep so many copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, but they’re up on the closet shelf now,” Conrad says, walking over to her.</p><p>“Chronological order?”</p><p>“You’re so type A.” He shakes his head.</p><p>“That’s not an answer,” she replies, smooth.</p><p>“Yes, chronological.” Conrad sits down next to her on the bed. “Aren’t those from, like, 1997?”</p><p>“I wanted to keep them around,” Nic murmurs. “Some things aren’t meant to be thrown out.”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>It’s too soon and she’ll get hurt and he might walk away like everyone else.</p><p>Conrad steps out, pours himself some water (“why are National Geographics so heavy? what’s the paper made of, lead?”), and he comes back in. He lies down on the bed, wiping sweat off his brow. He gives her some silence.</p><p>Nic walks to the closet, pulls out July 2001 of Reader’s Digest, and she tries not to smile at an article about celebrating Valentine’s Day when you have a toddler and your bathtub is filled with rubber ducks, not rose petals. The author’s wearing a polka-dot blouse, a laundry basket balanced on her hip. The story cracks jokes about timing sips of wine in between calls to the babysitter, or asking a four-star restaurant to use some to-go boxes once in a while.</p><p>Nic smiles, though. She pulls the magazine close to her chest, so Conrad won’t see the pictures, and she wonders how home would look if she had her own July 2001.</p><p>They start small, they do. Little things edging closer to the brim of confession.</p><p>He meets her father a handful of months later. Conrad calls him ‘sir.’</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thank you for reading! Comments and kudos are very appreciated, and I take requests too if anyone has any?</p><p>p.s. Fun inspiration, I'm afraid of whale sharks, which are actually at the Georgia Aquarium, and those things are terrifying. Gentle giant? Gentle??? Lies. Those things are like 300 times larger than me, and their mouths are like an abyss.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thank you for reading!!! This is a drabble I wrote like a month ago but I just wanted it to be INTIMATE and soft and early-morning-introspective. Hopefully I'll have part 2 written soon!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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